In this article, the authors confront the thesis found in historical discourse about the dominance of male figures in historical narratives present in the public sphere. In order to do so, they analyse the new research field that is the social networking site YouTube and the most popular channels on historical topics contained therein. The main research question is whether women are marginalised in the narratives contained in the sources discussed, in which contexts they appear and what is the reception of the films in which they appear. In addition, the authors look at the question of the form of historical narratives. The study combines quantitative methods (descriptive statistics, correspondence analysis) as well as qualitative methods (Northrop Frye’s typology of story motifs. For this purpose, 551 films were analysed, which were then annotated using seven groups of tags corresponding to the content of the sources ‑ concerning the func-tioning of female characters and the subject matter of the films. As a result of the analyses carried out, it was observed that the thesis of the absolute dominance of male characters in historical narratives does not fully hold true under the conditions of Web 2.0 sources in terms of quantity, while in terms of content it cannot be accepted unreservedly in the context of the very diverse use of female themes in social media resources.

This article deals with recent Polish herstory narrations, i.e. works of fiction that, while relying on distinctly literary techniques and devices, foreground the feminine experience of history, and moreover, may be associated with the so-called Herstory Turn in Polish humanities and cultural studies. This category of fictions includes also novels in which the herstory narration belongs to a female subject created by a male author, notably Jacek Dehnel’s Abbess Macryna (Matka Makryna), Ignacy Karpowicz’s Little Sonya (Sońka) and Jarosław Kamiński’s Just Lola (Tylko Lola). These three novels are analyzed with the aim of showing how their narrative strategy foregrounds the women narrators/main characters (acting as history’s true subjects), identifying the marks of authorial imitation of the feminine discourse, and, finally, asking the question about man’s status in an ostensibly feminine text. It seems that one way of answering it would be to point to the male author’s validating the feminine experience of history and ensuring that it can be heard.